poshenloh

Thank you for sharing this. I'm the founder of NOVID. The problem has been that no other app provided direct value to the user. Other apps are designed to protect other people from you if you get exposed (they then tell you to isolate to protect others). NOVID directly protects you from others, by anonymously warning you of COVID's approach along your relationship network.

This reversal of incentives is critical.

On top of that, NOVID also actually demonstrates the necessary accuracy to function. It is the only app which dares to report estimated distances to every user on their screen.

We are trying as hard as we can to let people know about these two major points of differentiation from the rest of the contact tracing app space. Thank you for helping!

Thanks for asking. I'm the founder of NOVID. Our app has a pet mode if your pet does not like it. This doesn't seem to have been a problem. The microphone is also not always listening. It turns on for 2 seconds when needed. The complete app source code has been given to a university security research team for review, and they will see that the microphone is used only for its intended purpose: to process ultrasonic frequencies.

I think that excellence in math is actually in everyone's reach. The main questions are why and how to reach it. :)

The article surveys the field of enrichment programs and activities, many of which are available only to people in certain areas. I've witnessed the immense local impact of those outreach efforts, while visiting Math Circles, high schools, and academic competitions around the country. The people who lead those events (mostly after-hours or on weekends) are an incredible bunch, and many of them do it out of their passion for the subject.

However, I think we would all gain if we could engage everyone in math/science, no matter where they live. The success of these programs shows that interesting content increases interest! The Internet allows us to level the playing field, and scale the impact of free educational resources to the world.

I was once at a math education conference where groups were pitching ways to develop math talent. These programs sometimes need financial sponsorship from governments or foundations, so that they can remain accessible across socioeconomic lines. On the second morning of the conference, I suddenly thought: how much money does our public school system spend trying to teach soccer each year? (I don't think it's much.) It seems that many students achieve fairly high levels of proficiency regardless.

Of course, there is still much value in funding the current math education efforts, but that made me think about whether significant gains could come from finding out how to communicate educational content in the most engaging way. That would take a page from the startup playbook (optimizing for engagement).

So, I got my hands dirty. I launched a startup (expii.com) to crowdsource and rate free interactive lessons in math and science, to quantitatively evaluate an organized collection of these resources, distributed at scale across the world. The objective is to turn every smartphone into a pocket tutor, delivering the most engaging lessons produced by the combined creativity of the world.

That's a big project. In the meantime, while the content is crowdsourcing, I also am broadcasting interesting nuggets of math each week at expii.com/solve (again free). These deliver the same topics I talk about in person at middle- and high-school math enrichment events around the country when I visit them to give guest talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sxVgJ_wPaM&feature=youtu.be...

My thought process is that if I'm taking the time to develop the materials to deliver to only 200 people at a time, then we should harness the Internet to scale the distribution to the world, while also packaging the content in a fun way, to show to the mass audience why math is actually a very interesting subject. :)

Ultimately, I think that the global project to build interest and excellence in math is an enormous task, which needs the insight and hard work of a great multitude of people, and a diversity of ideas and approaches. Thanks to everyone who is pitching in on this mission! :)

Thanks! :) We were really thrilled to post the problem.

Our rope question from expii.com/solve is a multi-layered math puzzle. If you haven't seen it before, the answer is often quite surprising: a human can walk under the circle even though the 710 inches of extra length are shared over the whole earth's circumference. Basic human intuition produces the most common answers, which are the bacteria or the ladybug. This helps to illustrate the purpose of math: to help us reason to determine the truth when basic intuition fails. If basic intuition were always right, then we wouldn't need math!

If you had seen the puzzle before though, you would already know that the rope lifts high, because it lifts by 710/(2*pi) inches, which is 113.0000095... taking us to the second layer of math embedded deeper in the problem. That is remarkably close to a whole number, which is surprising because pi is an irrational number. This means that pi is very close to 355/113, which brings us to the topic of Continued Fraction representations of irrational numbers, and amazing rational approximations of pi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mil%C3%BC

So, this problem hits at both basic and advanced levels. :)

There are many interesting ways to teach math through multi-layered puzzles which have something for everyone, no matter where you are in the experience spectrum. Our goal is to provide these for free, disseminated over the Internet. :)

I think that one main issue is that many people unfortunately equate math with routine calculations or rote memorization. I think it's valuable to communicate that actually math is the art of creative thinking. To do this, it helps to share some "gems", or examples with powerful "Aha" factors.

Along these lines, I have a very fresh one: last week, I just had a very shocking (mathematical) realization while thinking about football:

There is a way to instantly see the optimal running angle when evading an equal-speed defender in football: eyeball the line which runs through the midpoint between you and the defender, and see where it hits the edge of the field - run straight there.

I was immediately floored by this observation, because it is so easy in retrospect that it should be common knowledge. Yet literally everybody I've told this to has said that it was new to them - mathematicians & people from the general public. I quickly threw together a video to share it across the community:

https://youtu.be/9sxVgJ_wPaM?list=PLqv4sKOD1bsUoSs-SbzlA2BE1...

I think that by thinking of and packaging cool nuggets of "math" like this to share, we can help rebrand the image of math. :)

Thanks, @j2kun for your contributions to the math scene! :)

I agree! I think that many people have interesting ways to communicate where they see the excitement in math. Your blog lets you scale your impact through the Internet, which is great, and it's even more powerful when coupled with the in-person experience from guest lectures. :)

Indeed, when thinking of effective ways to scale up the in-person outreach efforts that I was engaging in (as National Coach + teaching at CMU + expii.com), I started posting my weekly math enrichment discussion topics onto the Internet. I think that's the way that we'll ultimately be able to completely level the playing field for everyone in the world.

Correct! The fact that this breaks Ranked-Choice Voting is another reason why this is an interesting example. If the each camp in the population were to sit down and think what they'd prefer, the outcome would be in favor of Jones. So, even if they were using Ranked-Choice voting, Camp 2 would strategically vote, putting their favorite at the bottom, so that they end up better off overall.

Actually, Jones is what is known as the Condorcet winner in this election. :)

Hi there!

This week problem features a very surprising voting paradox, which is directly relevant to next week's primaries in the USA. It's a mathematical logic puzzle, designed to stun with the enormous power of strategic voting. It's also a public service announcement which is independently useful for informing the public (just in time for the primaries) that it may not always be ideal to vote for your favorite candidate. We designed it in a bite-sized (mobile) and shareable format so that it could get the point across to as many people as quickly as possible!

Thanks for your comments! :)

You are describing the projects that are on our roadmap. :) We felt that the initial conceptual map would be an essential backbone for data-driven guidance services that we could then build upon it. So, we invested a serious amount of effort into creating this first pass. The math and science maps were created through a collaboration led by our Education Director, who has taught in middle-school and high-school classrooms, and now teaches at the University of Pittsburgh down the street. The other partners in the collaboration were alumni of International Math Olympiad teams and scientists from the Hertz Foundation Fellowship program. :)

We're continuing to iterate on our concept maps, but in the meantime, our Engineering team is moving forward on more projects which successively build on our growing structure.

Your encouragement means a lot to us, and we'll keep on trucking!

This is a really good question! We don't think we're doing anything suspicious, and there aren't even any payment gateways anywhere on the site. To be honest, we weren't familiar with BlueCoat. Do you know what tends to make them rate a site as Suspicious?

We're just trying to create a valuable free resource, through crowd-sourcing. :)

We created this interface so that curious people could explore and see how everything fit together. :)